The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by Barbara Vine

  Her own mother had belonged to a time that must seem to Sarah and Hope a dark-age generation. The words she had used unconsciously on the phone came back to her. They were those her mother had spoken to her in a quite different context, words all mothers once perhaps used to their girls on the brink of marriage: “Is there anything you want to ask me?” One thing was for certain, she would never repeat them to Sarah or Hope in the sense they had been used to her.

  The night before her wedding, her mother had said to her in a deceptively casual way, “Is there anything you want to ask me about, you know, tomorrow night?”

  Ursula was terribly embarrassed and taken aback. “No, thanks,” she muttered, not looking at Betty.

  “There’s not much in it, anyway,” said Betty. “I mean, if you’re expecting the sort of thing you read about in books, I can tell you you’ll be disappointed. Just don’t build your hopes up, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Ursula had not built her hopes up. Indeed, having by then perused a number of sex books, which, by 1963, were becoming increasingly frank and explicit, she knew very well to expect no wonders the first time or even the second. Sexual fulfillment must be worked for, with mutual understanding and consideration. For this reason, she rather wished Gerald had not been so circumspect and had taken her away for a couple of weekends in advance of their marriage so that their wedding night might be more perfect than could reasonably be anticipated. But, in the event, the books, not to mention Betty Wick, could hardly have been more wrong, and Ursula loved their lovemaking from the start. She found within herself a fount of sexual desire and free, eager response.

  On their honeymoon, they went to the newly attractive holiday place, Yugoslavia, the Dalmatian coast. It was warm and sunny, and while the hotel was strange and rather primitive, with one bathroom to a floor and the key to it always missing, and the food consisted mainly of pork and green peppers, they had a large airy bedroom with lace curtains at the window and a tentlike mosquito net over the big wooden bed. Ursula could have spent all day as well as all night inside that all-enveloping white net, stroking Gerald’s body, kissing Gerald, receiving him into herself with long sighs and delighted laughs of pleasure. It was he who laughingly resisted, made her get up, wrest that bathroom key out of the management, and, once they had showered in cold water, explore the town, walk the beach, swim.

  She couldn’t keep herself from touching him. When they walked, she hung on to his arm or put her arm around his waist. He said it was too hot for that, and it was, but still she needed to touch him, just to feel his skin on her skin, his brown skin under her fingertips, and when they sat on the rocks, she pressed herself against him, turning his face to hers to kiss him. Now, when she looked back, she was ashamed. She was so ashamed that even the memory could make her redden and her cheeks feel hot when she pressed her cold fingers against them.

  One evening, he had said to her, “You are the sort of woman most men would dream of being married to.”

  She took it as a compliment and a warm tide of joy flowed through her body. She was especially delighted because that afternoon, when they had returned to their room for the siesta most people took, she had stripped off her clothes and pulled him down onto her, thrusting her full breasts into his hands, smiling and murmuring his name, parting her legs to receive him between them, shameless and wanton because she hadn’t known there was any reason for reticence. And he, though also smiling, had shaken his head and made a little pushing away gesture with his hands, had murmured, “No, no, not now,” and lain down under the net with his back to her.

  So later, when he made that flattering remark, she was happy, and no less so at its corollary, though surprised. “I didn’t know you; I just thought I did. I didn’t expect ardor.”

  “What did you expect?”

  She knew now. Indifference. Perhaps Betty’s reaction. “I don’t know, Little Bear,” he said. “Ursa Minor, Constellation, I don’t know what I expected.”

  Minor, yes. Acquiescence was what she got from him. That was something she also knew now. Well, she had known it for years. Not on their honeymoon, though; she hadn’t known it then. She had thought he was tired, reminded herself he was fourteen years older than she, when in those last days and nights there was no lovemaking and she was rejected, if with rueful smiles and amused protests. They went home, to Hampstead, to the house on Holly Mount, and she didn’t know how sharply the image of that room in Cavtat would be imprinted on her mind, so that she would always associate in the future white net, draped, streaming, gathered, enveloping, with sexual pleasure.

  But did he? Or rather, with sexual excess, profligacy, dismay? And was that the explanation for his recoiling from the mist, that it reminded him? Folds of white net, eddying billows of white mist. She thought this theory of hers far-fetched, but not to be entirely discounted. It was a long time since confronting the suspicion—no, the certain knowledge—that he disliked making love to her, that he loathed it, could cause her pain. So perhaps when he had seen the white mist hang from the white sky, he, too, had remembered that gauzy bedroom, the smell of sex, her wetness and softness and openness, her uninhibited passion.

  He was writing a book and she understood that it exhausted him; sometimes he worked throughout the evenings. She even told herself that she was excessively desirous and, although she was enough of a child of her time not to think there might be something wrong with her, she did tell herself that she had gotten into an absurd habit. There was more to life than sex. Such as learning to be a wife. To cook, to entertain his friends. She found herself able to decipher his curious handwriting, and this surprised him. He was pleasantly surprised that she could read what he had written, when so many typists in the past had given up in despair. Without telling him what she was doing, she abstracted his first chapter from the bottom of the pile of manuscript, took it away, and typed it up, producing fifteen perfect pages.

  Presenting it to him later, she half-expected a cold incredulity, even reproaches. By that time, the early signs of his rejection of her had begun to show themselves. She hadn’t understood what they were, what she had done, but she was already wary; she was watchful for signs, on the verge of being afraid of him. The typing of the fifteen pages, she realized later, had been done to placate him, to make him pleased with her.

  There was no indignation, no disbelief. He was clearly delighted. He looked at the pages in wonderment, told her she was clever. She thought he might jump up and put his arms around her, kiss her out of gratitude, and he did pick up her hand and bring it to his lips. She had to be content with that. It was a more affectionate gesture than she had received for weeks.

  “Would you like me to type the whole book for you?” she asked him.

  “What do you think?” he said, smiling.

  The novel was Eye in the Eclipse, the story of Jacob Manley, a religious fanatic, who, in a gesture of self-sacrifice and for the sake of propriety, marries a widow with five children. He supports the family, encourages his stepchildren to work hard at school and better themselves, but he is unable to give them love. Ursula thought she had never enjoyed a book so much as this novel, set in East London in the forties and fifties. None of those books she had devoured before she was married had interested her half so much, and she understood that this was partly because he had written it and as she read she could hear his voice. She read each chapter before she began to type, relishing the characters and the dialogue, but looking for him in vain. Nothing in the book seemed to bear any relation to what he had told her of his early life.

  The typescript she produced pleased him. Doing this for him would become her work, the job she had vaguely thought she ought to have. She was proud of herself.

  That was something to tell Sarah. When she got over what was so evidently troubling her. When she phoned again with a spate of enthusiastic questions.

  The mist had lifted, but its rising would be temporary. In half an hour, the pale blue sky and hazy white sun would once more
be covered, the lone and level sands stretch bleakly under the dense canopy, the sky be gone as well as the view of the hotel and even the flat expanse of gently lapping sea. And the white cottony floss would press against Gerald’s study windows.…

  Meanwhile, it was almost bright down there, and with the lifting of the mist, the people had begun to return, as they always did, with the inevitability of birds appearing when dawn breaks. In the distance, she saw the Fleming family, up against the dunes, with a windbreak behind them, though there was no wind. James and Edith were digging in the sand, Sam Fleming and his daughter-in-law sitting in deck chairs. She had done her two baby-sitting stints and on the second occasion had handed over the stamps she had collected to be given to James. There had been no more demand for her services and she hadn’t expected to see them again. She knew they were going home at the end of the week.

  Now she thought there was no point in making them acknowledge her, and she would have passed fifty yards from them without turning her head, but she heard Sam’s voice call, “Mrs. Candless!”

  She turned and went up the beach. Something strange, unexpected, and unwelcome happened to her. Gerald had for a long time kept a photograph of Samuel Beckett in his study, pinned to the wall, as he occasionally did keep photographs of writers he admired. Ursula thought Sam Fleming, with his lantern jaw and piercing eyes and full, mobile mouth, looked a lot like Beckett. She didn’t know if Beckett had also been tall and very thin, but she suspected so. The sudden powerful attraction he exerted over her, that she had been quite unaware of at their previous meetings, seemed to hit her between the eyes. It was enough to stop her in her tracks, cause her to take a deep breath. Then she went on.

  They spoke to her, said things about the mist, the clearing of the mist. Molly said to her son, calling him from his sand-castle building, “What do you say to Mrs. Candless, James?”

  “Thank you very much for the stamps,” said the child.

  “I’m glad you were pleased.”

  Sam Fleming was looking hard at her. Ursula thought there might be something in the idea that if you were very powerfully attracted to someone, that made you attractive to them, that there was some chemical or telepathic exchange. Then she told herself that should Sam Fleming be attracted to a woman, it wouldn’t be to someone of his own age, a skinny woman of fifty-seven in jeans and a sweatshirt, with cropped graying hair, but a bright and nubile thirty-five-year-old. It wasn’t the first time she’d been attracted to a man other than Gerald, nor would it be the first time that nothing had come of it.

  She said, “I’m afraid the mist is coming back. It always does when the sky looks like that.”

  “Then we shall pack up and go in for our tea.”

  She said good-bye to them. It was unlikely she would see them again, so she wished them a good journey home. Her legs felt a little weak. Her body was given over to a yearning. It was exactly the same feeling she had had thirty-five years ago, when she had first known Gerald, and she marveled that such a sensation could repeat itself so faithfully after so long. When the woman who experienced it was utterly changed. When it had been so rudely mocked that first time and so roughly repudiated.

  The mist rolled in and cloaked her. It hid them, so that even if she had looked back, they would have been concealed from her. And she was glad of it, glad of the isolation in which to recover. Then, as she approached the path and the steps, she heard someone running after her.

  She turned around then and waited.

  Sarah had gone early to St. Catherine’s House. She expected to get it done with and to have the day to assemble her notes and draw her conclusions before going to Hope’s for supper.

  People were already queuing outside the Public Search Room. Even getting inside took time. And once the doors were opened and she had begun on her task, she found things more complicated than she had expected. Forms had to be filled in, as well as one ledger after another scrutinized.

  These were heavy and there were a great many of them. Eventually, in the ledger for the summer of 1918, she found the marriage of George Candless to Kathleen Mary Mitchell. Now she had to move on to births. It was a tiring business. Luckily, she had a rough idea where to look, and she found the birth of Joan Kathleen Candless without trouble in June 1919. That of Gerald Candless was easy to find. May 10, 1926, and here it was.

  The Candlesses had possibly had more children in between. Now Sarah wished she had asked Joan Thague. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do that, because Mrs. Thague had been so distraught. Bewildered and distressed and deaf. Tearful enough and upset enough for Sarah to have wondered about the facts, incoherently outlined, of a little brother dead in April 1932, a month before his sixth birthday. But within the next half hour, she came upon the registration of the child’s death: “Gerald Francis Candless, age five. Cause of death: heart failure; contributory cause, meningitis.”

  So it was true. She hadn’t really been in doubt, but reading it here in this official way was different from hearing it uttered by Joan Thague and different even from seeing the words on the little boy’s aged yellow death certificate. She didn’t relish telling Hope.

  “You’re not saying Daddy told lies!”

  Hope stared at her sister like an enemy.

  “All right, but what other explanation is there? It was really quite pathetic, this poor old woman, and the little brother dying. I don’t think I’m easily embarrassed, but I was then.”

  “There must have been two Gerald Candlesses,” said Hope.

  “What, two boys named Gerald Francis Candless, both born in the same town on the tenth of May, 1926, and both with parents named Kathleen and George?”

  Hope looked on the verge of tears. “But why would Daddy do that? You mean he was someone else, don’t you? Someone else entirely? But why would he do that?” She was a lawyer, and she quickly saw why someone would do that. “Because he’d done something criminal? Because he was wanted for that? Oh, I won’t believe it. Not Daddy. I can’t believe that.”

  “That need not necessarily be the reason,” said Sarah. “Something awful might have happened to him that he wanted to put behind him. The thing is, when did he do it? Obviously not when he was six. I mean, we don’t even know if whoever he was was the same age as the little boy who died. Or came from the same place. Or was even English, come to that. He may have done it when he was eighteen, or five years later, but not ten years later, because that was when his first book was published, and he was Gerald Candless then.”

  “You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?” said Hope, not altogether pleasantly.

  “Yes, of course I have. I haven’t liked it, Hope. But if I’m going to write this book …”

  “I wish to God you weren’t going to write the bloody book! I wish we’d never had to know. I don’t want to know this. I hate knowing this.”

  “Hopie,” said Sarah, “if I hadn’t found it, someone else would. Someone else writing his biography. There are bound to be biographers. Isn’t it better it should be me than some stranger?”

  Fabian, who had been cooking, stuck his head around the corner. “Ready in five minutes,” he said, and then he said, “The Day of the Jackal.”

  “The what?”

  “In The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth, there’s a man who wants to change his identity to get a passport. So he goes to graveyards and searches till he finds a tombstone of a very young child of the same sex and who would now be approximately the same age as himself. And then when he’s got the name and all the rest of it, he finds that child in the records and applies for a birth certificate in that name and thence for a passport.”

  “But the person would be dead,” Hope objected.

  “Nobody’s going to know that, are they? The passport people aren’t going to check. Maybe that’s what your dad did. He couldn’t have read the book, because it was published years afterward, but maybe he had the same idea.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Sarah said. “Th
e Gerald Candless who died didn’t have a tombstone. I asked. Oh, not because of what you’re saying, but I suppose I just—well, I didn’t actually believe her at first. It seemed so bizarre, so awful—it still does. I said to her, ‘Where was he buried?’ and she said—Oh, she was crying; it was dreadful—that they’d put a wooden cross on the grave, but when she went back to Ipswich and looked for it twenty years afterward, it was gone; there was no clue as to where it had been.”

  Sarah ate Fabian’s pasta, but Hope didn’t feel much like eating. She drank a lot of the wine Sarah had brought, gazing broodingly at her sister. Fabian, who had known him quite well, thought of the man who was dead and tried to fit him into this role of a villain or fugitive but couldn’t. Gerald Candless had been so decisive, so authoritative, so in control.

  “What about Ursula?” he said.

  “What about her?” Hope poured herself the last of the wine. “She won’t know. I hope someone’s going to open another bottle.”

  Fabian, because he had cooked and served the meal, sat tight, declining to make a move. “You can’t assume that just because it happened before they were married she doesn’t know anything.”

  “I nearly asked her,” said Sarah. “I phoned her last night and I nearly asked her; it was on the tip of my tongue.”

  “What, like that, straight out?”

  “No, not exactly. Of course not. I was going to say something about did she know if Dad had ever thought of changing his name.”

  “I like ‘thought,’ ” said Fabian.

  Hope rounded on him. “Well, I don’t. I hate it. I hate all this.”

  She went outside, banging doors, looking for more wine. Sarah said, “That pasta was delicious. You’re a good cook, Fabby.”

  “Someone has to do it,” said Fabian, grinning.

  “I don’t know what to do now. I just don’t know what on earth to do. I can’t write a memoir about someone when I don’t know who he was. D’you know, I feel quite sick when I have to say that. I feel sort of hollow. Because it’s us, too, isn’t it? If he was someone else, who are we? What’s our real name?”